Politics, like University of California administration, seems dominated by two personality archetypes; the bright-eyed, excitable newcomers eager to make a difference (usually students trying to get facilities or funding for student groups) and system-weary, jaded or cynical administrative types whose principle preoccupation is the survival of office politics. The fireworks that ensue from the collision of these two personality types usually results in more of the second – often by converting the first into the second. And state or national politics, at least to my armchair-borne, oversimplified perspective, bears a lot of resemblance to that psychological progression.
But this year seems different. It’s hard for me to gauge exactly how popular president-elect Obama really is, living as I do in California. By electoral votes, the election was a landslide, but I’ve read that the popular vote was much closer – something on the order of a 52%/46% split. But you wouldn’t think so, to judge by appearances these few months later. Maybe it’s the ‘liberal bias’ of CNN reporting, but Obama’s impending inauguration carries such a positive tone, such a swelling of hope, even despite – or perhaps even in reaction to – the glum tone set by the national economy and the war in Iraq. Maybe it’s just the simple hope that a new administration – any new administration – would be an improvement over the previous one, punctuated by so many dismal and obvious catastrophes and apparent errors in oversight or judgment. Whatever the reason, it’s truly refreshing to see this much optimism, this much anticipation, this much apparent faith that the new administration has some hope of making things right. Certainly, Obama and his team has an aura of capability that stands in contravention to the picture of leadership we’ve become accustomed to these past two terms: self-interested executives, faithless, incompetent management, bungled regulatory oversight, lavish earmarks and stultifyingly blatant pork, ill-informed decisions, preposterous ineloquence, insouciant arrogance, stubborn denial, wanton hypocrisy, and corruption so commonplace it’s taken as par for the course. I don’t know how much truth there is to the current image of Obama’s nascent administration: technological savvy, meritocracy over nepotism, vitality, circumspection, and a masterful appeal to symbolism in the form of tributes to Lincoln and King – but I hope it’s all true. The cynic and the jaded realist have both had the helm for long enough, so long that the weariness of being have settled so deeply into the daily routine that for years there’s been little joy left in work, little pride left in being American. If you had asked me a year ago, whether I thought this country could elect anyone but a white man to the highest office in the land, I would have answered “probably not,” citing the embarrassment of the don’t-ask, don’t-tell racism that lurks behind the politically polite veneer of correctness that has pasted itself over the national psyche as a stand-in for real conscience. I’m so glad to have been proven wrong here.
In watching the inaugural ceremony, though, it’s clear from many perspectives, from the words of the commentators to the visuals of the crowds on the National Mall that this one transcends politics. Anchors, commentators, observers, and average people on the street all seem to be in agreement: this inauguration is a moment of social significance, of cultural significance. That it has made history goes without saying, but it is much more than a moment in time. The sense that everyone seems to feel – that sense that I dare to let myself feel – is that things will never be the same, and that voices unheard until now are being raised not just in triumph, but in goodwill. The view on the Mall is of a pastiche the likes of which I’ve never seen on-camera at a political event. Young mixed with old, faces of many colors – Obama will be the face of the United States abroad and that in itself is a change. But the picture of the Mall seems already to speak to the rhetoric in the president-elect’s speeches and addresses – the face of America, sampled imperfectly across the fortunate (if freezing) two million people who have gathered on the mall – has changed. He made this happen. It’s extraordinary.
Charisma and goodwill. For all his work at expanding the power of the executive branch, dubya has never at any point in his presidency had these two great forces behind him like this, even in the days immediately following 9/11 when solidarity and sympathy together opened a window of opportunity for a fractious nation to come together. It’s possible that charisma and goodwill are a president’s greatest potential powers even though they stand outside any official capacity granted to the office by the laws of the land. The president himself (or someday, herself) is a symbol, after all; of course we have three branches of government. Of course there are nine judges on the supreme court, a hundred senators, 435 representatives, and of course the executive branch is not one man, but rather composed of the president’s cabinet and administrators. Of course our federal system is designed with attention to the concept of checks and balances – this doesn’t change the fact that we are visual creatures and that visual symbols hold more than their share of power. When you think of the face of the federal government, it is the face and figure of the president that comes first to mind, in any age. Charisma and goodwill is useful politically, of course, but it matters outside the halls of government. It makes a difference in everyday life.
I’ve listened to commentators delivering the reality check – that the president alone has only so much power. It’s been said that the Fed and its monetary policy, even with the power to print money and set the interest rate, is effectively tasked with changing the tide armed with little more than a fancy bucket. The president can introduce legislation but still needs Congress to pass it. The limits of the presidency are built into the Constitution and its amendments. But that still doesn’t change the fact that the president, more than anyone else, is the face of our government. I think that’s why having rapport with the people can make for a more effective president. If real policy is good medicine or bad medicine, rapport is the placebo effect – subjective, filled with potential, apparently based on nothing ‘real,’ and unpredictably effective.
We all have enough to worry about in an average day. Most people do not go out of their way to do something new unless they are moved by something. Powerful desire. Oppressive boredom. Great fear or terror. Deep idealism. I think that’s from where arises the adage, “things will get worse before they get better.” If something is bothering you but you can make it go away temporarily by complaining about it and letting it go, then you probably will. It’s only after something becomes intolerable that many would be moved to get up and finally do something about it. For all the positivism and optimism that now surrounds the inauguration, I remember that during the election itself there were a lot of people who resolved to vote in the next election because they believed that they could not bear just letting “it,” whatever it was, to happen again without at least making a statement. For better or worse, whether by circumstance, inaction, or choice, that’s the way we are. It’s a cultural force – it’s also an economic force. Consumer behavior is driven by mood and emotion, after all. For all the planning and bookkeeping we do, our spending behavior is not a process driven by rationalism. Even the most rational people are still moved by their emotions, whether they admit it or not. Depressions involve so many feedback effects that they can become self-fulfilling prophecies; people expecting hard times will, within their capacity, save more for rainy days and spend less in the present. A rapidly growing economy is driven by steady, healthy spending of the sort that can look reckless to people whose decisions are dominated by concern about retirement. Anyone who’s taken even the most elementary course in macroeconomics would be able to tell you that expectations in consumer behavior drive supply and demand, so the psychological and emotional expectation of hard times or good times usually result in concomitant crashes or booms in the economy – the part of everyday life that everyone cares about whether they’re politically passionate or disinterested. The president’s rapport with the people – reflected not just in his (or her) policies, photo opportunities, and public addresses, but also in their feelings toward him. I think our new president has – at this moment – suffused the climate with hope and goodwill, and the press has certainly taken note of the outpouring and swelling of joy and support among the people. Obama is noted to have said on his train ride to the Capitol, “I love you too.” The days leading up to the inauguration itself have been festive and so filled with affection that I can’t imagine how many times he must have heard the same coming from the unprecedented crowds gathered to show their support for him, and I can only hope that the optimism feeds back and stays strong through his term. Certainly we’ll need it. There are so many ills plaguing the country at the moment, the patient may not care whether the medicine is real or it’s just the placebo effect that works the cure. In the end, what’s the difference?
It’s an odd thing, but I think there’s no denying its potential. It’s more than just the ‘power of positive thinking,’ it’s the power of positive feeling, that moves the heart and not just the mind. That’s the power of leadership. My blessings to our new president – I hope he uses it well.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Who wrote all this?
Not having posted here in over a year, I went back to read over some of my old posts. I'm a little amazed at some of them, really, not so much in their content (I am still who I've always been), but in their expression. I think my ability to express myself in writing has deteriorated considerably over the past year, as most of my writing now is purely 'professional' in nature, always preoccupied with the expression of thoughts not turned inward. Sure, many of those older posts were dramatic, overwrought, and in too many places striving for eloquence that may have turned out more artificial and stilted than articulate or artful - but it disturbs me that I may have had a better hold on my mind just a few years ago than I do now.
I have nearly no time to write for myself anymore... but as they say, use it or lose it.
Not having posted here in over a year, I went back to read over some of my old posts. I'm a little amazed at some of them, really, not so much in their content (I am still who I've always been), but in their expression. I think my ability to express myself in writing has deteriorated considerably over the past year, as most of my writing now is purely 'professional' in nature, always preoccupied with the expression of thoughts not turned inward. Sure, many of those older posts were dramatic, overwrought, and in too many places striving for eloquence that may have turned out more artificial and stilted than articulate or artful - but it disturbs me that I may have had a better hold on my mind just a few years ago than I do now.
I have nearly no time to write for myself anymore... but as they say, use it or lose it.
A failure of direction
(warning – extremely stream-of-consciousness and a total downer. Abandon all hope, ye who enter blah blah blah. To my friends, especially - don't read until well after the holidays. This is depressing stuff. I'm venting because I have to. Please don't ruin your holidays.)
I’m never what I should be.
My father’s one of those slightly taciturn types. Oh, he’s not the strong silent type – he makes small talk, loves talking about golf and particle physics – but when it comes to statements about topics that fall under the ambit of life’s direction – like my job, my personal life, my being 33 and single, he doesn’t say too much. We’ve had so few actual conversations on those core topics that every time the subject is broached, it’s him talking at me, with me having little to say in response for fear of it devolving into a shouting match (more likely my fault than his. I’m combative in an argument, but I love my father and part of me doesn’t want to be sending him away with a shouting match ringing in his ears).
Dad just left the house, leaving me sitting here in silence over a brief tongue-lashing about not making the effort to go out and date more. I could tell him I’ve tried harder these past years but there wouldn’t have been much point in it. He’d probably just tell me I haven’t been trying hard enough, which would be difficult to hear because even my efforts over the past year would look fairly meager by the standards of the average person. Of course, I’m not the average person. I’m me – a strange little duck apparently defined, even by my closest friends, by an impossible combination of extraordinary ability and stubbornness, crippling insecurities, and a pickiness that is at once warranted and inexcusable.
But singlehood is just the one topic of many. Where should I even start? How about a lack of direction?
Most people wouldn’t think I have had any lack of direction in my life. I’ve been to graduate school and law school – like so many American-born Chinese children of my generation, college was never a choice – it was compulsory. Just another stage in life, so obvious and so expected that it would never cross our minds that it was actually a privilege. It felt like more of an obligation, a foregone conclusion. If we’re accused of not having a proper appreciation for the kind of opportunity it represents, we’re probably guilty of that. But what credit or appreciation does one give to one’s destiny, if there is such a thing? I can’t see what pride there would be in, say, being destined for greatness. That would just mean you were obligated to fulfill a preordained fate. That the freedom and control that so many of our parents cherish so strongly, having fled the Cultural Revolution or the crowded, limiting press of the Hong Kong or Taiwan of their age, is denied us from birth even as we grow into the ugly entitlement complexes and underappreciated luxury that, to the rest of the world, is the American birthright.
The direction stops with graduation, though. Like so many people, I had little to no idea what I wanted to do afterwards. I had a major – actually I had two – and that should have pointed me in some kind of career direction, right? Not really. I studied a major because you have to pick something. If you’re silly like me, you never decide and wind up with two. It’s a little like how so many people make so few actual, conscious decisions in their lives, instead living life on personality-autopilot. When one comes to a fork in the road, how many of us really know when we’re there? Life is full of choices and you usually make the one that feels right to you with little if any real deliberation. You made the choice you made at the time you made it because “you’re that guy.” You do as you are. Same with me and my education, me and my career. I don’t know what I want to be. I don’t know what I’m good at. I do know what I’m not good at. I have surprisingly little sense of direction – I’m merely in the habit of running very hard. It’s the only real reason I’ve come far enough that most people express some respect – or even admiration - where I’ve ended up. I don’t want to be nobody, so I tried very hard to excel, to be somebody – and now that I’m where I am, I don’t know at what point, if ever, I looked down the direction I traveled and said, “Yes, this is where I want to be.”
I’ve been a software engineer and now I am an attorney. Both are difficult jobs entailing very long hours – although I must say, being an attorney pays better and, believe it or not, saddles one with slightly less social stigma, lawyer jokes or no. (All of you out there who unconsciously hold strong stereotypes about engineers – yes, I’m looking at you). Being an associate is rather a consuming, voraciously demanding state of employment. My father doesn’t appreciate or doesn’t believe that being an associate at a law firm – even a law firm that isn’t one of the country’s premier sweatshops (and that whatever power you believe in, for that) - leaves as little time for one’s life that it really does. But even if he understood that, it would be beside the point – you can’t wait around for life to be nice to you and drop something in your lap. Life is hard. Life is unfair. You go out and fight, because when it comes down to the wire, it could be only you in your own corner. You work to survive and only a very lucky few work because they enjoy what they do. I would be among the first to say it, so I didn’t argue. Arguing would have made me a hypocrite.
“Why don’t you go and do something you love?” My first impulse is to laugh (appreciatively, mind you). My second is to offer excuses. But is there really something there? Is there something I don’t see, that everyone else does? I like tea. I like flowers. I like cheese. I like wushu. None of these are things I can really make a living at. I’ve learned to make a pretty good cup of tea (and now have even developed an intuition for making really delicious sweetened tea that would make a good dessert, in memoria de Lucy’s), so much so that friends from widely separate circles have all offered that I should do something with it. “You could bottle this. It’s better than anything out there.” “Go for it! If you opened a teahouse, I’d be your first customer!” (spoken by at least three people). I’ve seen the restaurant business, though – it’s a difficult endeavor, to say the least. A restaurant can’t solely be a labor of love – you need to advertise, you need to understand business and have an entrepreneurial spirit. But I’m lousy with money. The less I touch it, the better. I’m not good at making investments or monitoring my cashflow. My answer is simply to enough of it so that the average crisis won’t send any real shockwaves through my finances. For all my supposed intellect, it’s a blunt and brute-force approach to dealing with it, also rendered feasible only by my inexpensive tastes and a life largely devoid of big-ticket trappings (which is particularly important given the one HUGE big-ticket item, the mortgage for this house that I barely get to sleep in 7 hours a night). As for wushu, I don’t have the innate talent or the knowledge it would take to teach at a school (let alone open one of my own). I’ve substitute-taught from time to time, but nobody would want to learn from me, long-term. I’m anything but athletic – the attorney’s lifestyle makes it hard enough even to be healthy. I enjoy wushu immensely, but I couldn’t do it for a living. It’s a hobby. I’m not a professional. And if you’d seen how many kids out there style themselves as ‘professional’ – not truly having a sense of what it means outside of talent – you might enjoy a quiet chuckle at the throng of athletic kids who don’t really know what they’re getting themselves into. Ask any b-list actor or unrecognized stuntman as to whether they think their lives are comfortable or exciting. It’s what most of these kids are aiming at, whether they know it or not.
In a nutshell (to collect, contain, and curtail all that hand-wringing rambling), the career – it’s a mess. I must have had some degree of success to find myself where I am, with the accomplished people that I work with… but as to the simple things that I really enjoy, I probably couldn’t sustain myself doing them.
But Dad’s principal gripe with my career is not that I’ve made any bad choices – it’s that I let work consume my time and don’t pay enough attention to the business of living, whether that means keeping a tidy house, going out and finding dates, or even checking my mailbox more than once a week. There’s my problem – I work like crazy but it’s not to fulfill any obvious material need of my own! It’s true – one should work to live, not live to work. So what the hell, mes ami, is up with this abominable billable hour shit? We as a profession find ourselves in a ridiculous bind, with a poor set of motivators. The minimum billable’s a big stick, and it gets bigger every year. As to the carrot – the bonuses – they’re nice but worth relatively little when you consider that a working attorney’s most precious resource is time. It’s like the Mongolian quandary – you only have so much yak butter. So will you eat it for energy, or burn it for fuel? More money is worth nothing if you have no time to do anything with it. Oh, sure, I could save it… to put my kids through school. Oh, right! No kids! No wife! No girlfriend! No time to date, either! Which died first? The chicken, or the egg? But is it really work’s fault? When I take enough time to be honest with myself, I think I get angry at working so much because it’s convenient to be able to point at it and declare, “the billable hour has deprived me of all of these simple things that any human being would be able to enjoy” when perhaps I never had any of them to begin with.
What I hate most of all has been the ending of every day for the last fifteen years. I go to bed alone, with naught in my arms but a pillow and a head full of rambling and oftimes melancholy thoughts. I slip into the sheets and they are cold from having lain unattended and empty all day. I rest my head on my empty hands, and breathe in air filled with silence, tainted only by scents of bath soap and dust to keep me company. The absence of humanity is never more literal for me than it is at the end of every day. By too many accounts I’m as eligible a bachelor as any in these parts, so why am I single? Well, actually, that’s my fault, too. Have there been opportunities? Sure there have. And I let them all go because I wasn’t ready, or wasn’t in love, or didn’t want to settle, or wasn’t interested. For someone who goes out as staggeringly seldom as I do, I really ought to be amazed at the number of times a woman has expressed interest in me. For those of you keeping score, yes, it’s a small number – I can still count them on the fingers of my two hands. It’s still more ‘game’ than someone who’s constantly bent over books and laptops, who doesn’t comb his hair or have any sense of style, who works around 70 hours a week and doesn't party and who is all but socially invisible, should have. I once derided the adage, “’Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all” as failing to cover the all-too-common instance of unrequited love, where you have loved and lost all in the same instant leaving you with at best dashed hopes, and at worst a lifetime of longing. What a rotten trade. I have been the bearer and recipient of unrequited love alike – so even the cold comfort of victimization by fate, really, is denied me. A close friend fed me the unpleasant truth years ago – “You’re single because you choose to be single.” In other words, you might not be enamored of the options in front of you, but you have chosen to be single rather than to be with someone you don’t think you’d be head-over-heels crazy about. You can call it not wanting to settle if it makes you feel better, but viewed the other way, you haven’t given it a fair chance, either.
That’s it. I’ve purged for an hour, and all I’ve done is made myself slightly more aware of my own role in my problems. There are no answers here. No pleasant ones, anyway. None that I’m yet ready to face in waking life.
I’m sad. My Christmas ended in kind of a bah-humbug, and all told, maybe I deserved it.
(warning – extremely stream-of-consciousness and a total downer. Abandon all hope, ye who enter blah blah blah. To my friends, especially - don't read until well after the holidays. This is depressing stuff. I'm venting because I have to. Please don't ruin your holidays.)
I’m never what I should be.
My father’s one of those slightly taciturn types. Oh, he’s not the strong silent type – he makes small talk, loves talking about golf and particle physics – but when it comes to statements about topics that fall under the ambit of life’s direction – like my job, my personal life, my being 33 and single, he doesn’t say too much. We’ve had so few actual conversations on those core topics that every time the subject is broached, it’s him talking at me, with me having little to say in response for fear of it devolving into a shouting match (more likely my fault than his. I’m combative in an argument, but I love my father and part of me doesn’t want to be sending him away with a shouting match ringing in his ears).
Dad just left the house, leaving me sitting here in silence over a brief tongue-lashing about not making the effort to go out and date more. I could tell him I’ve tried harder these past years but there wouldn’t have been much point in it. He’d probably just tell me I haven’t been trying hard enough, which would be difficult to hear because even my efforts over the past year would look fairly meager by the standards of the average person. Of course, I’m not the average person. I’m me – a strange little duck apparently defined, even by my closest friends, by an impossible combination of extraordinary ability and stubbornness, crippling insecurities, and a pickiness that is at once warranted and inexcusable.
But singlehood is just the one topic of many. Where should I even start? How about a lack of direction?
Most people wouldn’t think I have had any lack of direction in my life. I’ve been to graduate school and law school – like so many American-born Chinese children of my generation, college was never a choice – it was compulsory. Just another stage in life, so obvious and so expected that it would never cross our minds that it was actually a privilege. It felt like more of an obligation, a foregone conclusion. If we’re accused of not having a proper appreciation for the kind of opportunity it represents, we’re probably guilty of that. But what credit or appreciation does one give to one’s destiny, if there is such a thing? I can’t see what pride there would be in, say, being destined for greatness. That would just mean you were obligated to fulfill a preordained fate. That the freedom and control that so many of our parents cherish so strongly, having fled the Cultural Revolution or the crowded, limiting press of the Hong Kong or Taiwan of their age, is denied us from birth even as we grow into the ugly entitlement complexes and underappreciated luxury that, to the rest of the world, is the American birthright.
The direction stops with graduation, though. Like so many people, I had little to no idea what I wanted to do afterwards. I had a major – actually I had two – and that should have pointed me in some kind of career direction, right? Not really. I studied a major because you have to pick something. If you’re silly like me, you never decide and wind up with two. It’s a little like how so many people make so few actual, conscious decisions in their lives, instead living life on personality-autopilot. When one comes to a fork in the road, how many of us really know when we’re there? Life is full of choices and you usually make the one that feels right to you with little if any real deliberation. You made the choice you made at the time you made it because “you’re that guy.” You do as you are. Same with me and my education, me and my career. I don’t know what I want to be. I don’t know what I’m good at. I do know what I’m not good at. I have surprisingly little sense of direction – I’m merely in the habit of running very hard. It’s the only real reason I’ve come far enough that most people express some respect – or even admiration - where I’ve ended up. I don’t want to be nobody, so I tried very hard to excel, to be somebody – and now that I’m where I am, I don’t know at what point, if ever, I looked down the direction I traveled and said, “Yes, this is where I want to be.”
I’ve been a software engineer and now I am an attorney. Both are difficult jobs entailing very long hours – although I must say, being an attorney pays better and, believe it or not, saddles one with slightly less social stigma, lawyer jokes or no. (All of you out there who unconsciously hold strong stereotypes about engineers – yes, I’m looking at you). Being an associate is rather a consuming, voraciously demanding state of employment. My father doesn’t appreciate or doesn’t believe that being an associate at a law firm – even a law firm that isn’t one of the country’s premier sweatshops (and that whatever power you believe in, for that) - leaves as little time for one’s life that it really does. But even if he understood that, it would be beside the point – you can’t wait around for life to be nice to you and drop something in your lap. Life is hard. Life is unfair. You go out and fight, because when it comes down to the wire, it could be only you in your own corner. You work to survive and only a very lucky few work because they enjoy what they do. I would be among the first to say it, so I didn’t argue. Arguing would have made me a hypocrite.
“Why don’t you go and do something you love?” My first impulse is to laugh (appreciatively, mind you). My second is to offer excuses. But is there really something there? Is there something I don’t see, that everyone else does? I like tea. I like flowers. I like cheese. I like wushu. None of these are things I can really make a living at. I’ve learned to make a pretty good cup of tea (and now have even developed an intuition for making really delicious sweetened tea that would make a good dessert, in memoria de Lucy’s), so much so that friends from widely separate circles have all offered that I should do something with it. “You could bottle this. It’s better than anything out there.” “Go for it! If you opened a teahouse, I’d be your first customer!” (spoken by at least three people). I’ve seen the restaurant business, though – it’s a difficult endeavor, to say the least. A restaurant can’t solely be a labor of love – you need to advertise, you need to understand business and have an entrepreneurial spirit. But I’m lousy with money. The less I touch it, the better. I’m not good at making investments or monitoring my cashflow. My answer is simply to enough of it so that the average crisis won’t send any real shockwaves through my finances. For all my supposed intellect, it’s a blunt and brute-force approach to dealing with it, also rendered feasible only by my inexpensive tastes and a life largely devoid of big-ticket trappings (which is particularly important given the one HUGE big-ticket item, the mortgage for this house that I barely get to sleep in 7 hours a night). As for wushu, I don’t have the innate talent or the knowledge it would take to teach at a school (let alone open one of my own). I’ve substitute-taught from time to time, but nobody would want to learn from me, long-term. I’m anything but athletic – the attorney’s lifestyle makes it hard enough even to be healthy. I enjoy wushu immensely, but I couldn’t do it for a living. It’s a hobby. I’m not a professional. And if you’d seen how many kids out there style themselves as ‘professional’ – not truly having a sense of what it means outside of talent – you might enjoy a quiet chuckle at the throng of athletic kids who don’t really know what they’re getting themselves into. Ask any b-list actor or unrecognized stuntman as to whether they think their lives are comfortable or exciting. It’s what most of these kids are aiming at, whether they know it or not.
In a nutshell (to collect, contain, and curtail all that hand-wringing rambling), the career – it’s a mess. I must have had some degree of success to find myself where I am, with the accomplished people that I work with… but as to the simple things that I really enjoy, I probably couldn’t sustain myself doing them.
But Dad’s principal gripe with my career is not that I’ve made any bad choices – it’s that I let work consume my time and don’t pay enough attention to the business of living, whether that means keeping a tidy house, going out and finding dates, or even checking my mailbox more than once a week. There’s my problem – I work like crazy but it’s not to fulfill any obvious material need of my own! It’s true – one should work to live, not live to work. So what the hell, mes ami, is up with this abominable billable hour shit? We as a profession find ourselves in a ridiculous bind, with a poor set of motivators. The minimum billable’s a big stick, and it gets bigger every year. As to the carrot – the bonuses – they’re nice but worth relatively little when you consider that a working attorney’s most precious resource is time. It’s like the Mongolian quandary – you only have so much yak butter. So will you eat it for energy, or burn it for fuel? More money is worth nothing if you have no time to do anything with it. Oh, sure, I could save it… to put my kids through school. Oh, right! No kids! No wife! No girlfriend! No time to date, either! Which died first? The chicken, or the egg? But is it really work’s fault? When I take enough time to be honest with myself, I think I get angry at working so much because it’s convenient to be able to point at it and declare, “the billable hour has deprived me of all of these simple things that any human being would be able to enjoy” when perhaps I never had any of them to begin with.
What I hate most of all has been the ending of every day for the last fifteen years. I go to bed alone, with naught in my arms but a pillow and a head full of rambling and oftimes melancholy thoughts. I slip into the sheets and they are cold from having lain unattended and empty all day. I rest my head on my empty hands, and breathe in air filled with silence, tainted only by scents of bath soap and dust to keep me company. The absence of humanity is never more literal for me than it is at the end of every day. By too many accounts I’m as eligible a bachelor as any in these parts, so why am I single? Well, actually, that’s my fault, too. Have there been opportunities? Sure there have. And I let them all go because I wasn’t ready, or wasn’t in love, or didn’t want to settle, or wasn’t interested. For someone who goes out as staggeringly seldom as I do, I really ought to be amazed at the number of times a woman has expressed interest in me. For those of you keeping score, yes, it’s a small number – I can still count them on the fingers of my two hands. It’s still more ‘game’ than someone who’s constantly bent over books and laptops, who doesn’t comb his hair or have any sense of style, who works around 70 hours a week and doesn't party and who is all but socially invisible, should have. I once derided the adage, “’Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all” as failing to cover the all-too-common instance of unrequited love, where you have loved and lost all in the same instant leaving you with at best dashed hopes, and at worst a lifetime of longing. What a rotten trade. I have been the bearer and recipient of unrequited love alike – so even the cold comfort of victimization by fate, really, is denied me. A close friend fed me the unpleasant truth years ago – “You’re single because you choose to be single.” In other words, you might not be enamored of the options in front of you, but you have chosen to be single rather than to be with someone you don’t think you’d be head-over-heels crazy about. You can call it not wanting to settle if it makes you feel better, but viewed the other way, you haven’t given it a fair chance, either.
That’s it. I’ve purged for an hour, and all I’ve done is made myself slightly more aware of my own role in my problems. There are no answers here. No pleasant ones, anyway. None that I’m yet ready to face in waking life.
I’m sad. My Christmas ended in kind of a bah-humbug, and all told, maybe I deserved it.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
I am remembered -_-
My time as a regular with the Stanford Wushu Club ended when I set off for law school five years ago. Especially since my falling out with my former coaches there, I figured that my time there had ended for good. But membership in a college club is like that - they're inherently generational, and life moves on. I did a lot of work there. I put my heart into the place without expecting to be remembered afterward, because every four years or so there's basically a complete changing of the guard. I figured that the truest test of whether I'd succeeded in doing what I'd set out to do would be if the club's spirit thrived long after I was gone.
I expected to be forgotten. And I was okay with it. The work wasn't really about me - it was about what I believed in.
But I wasn't forgotten, even after the falling out with the coaches. One of my coworkers took his young son to Stanford, and happened by a SMAP demo, including my old club. They stayed to talk, and my coworker, remembering from casual conversation that I'd done some wushu, asked if anyone there knew me. As it turns out, they did remember me. In terms so glowing that it would embarass me to repeat them here.
I'm not in the habit of having much faith in people. It's a happy thing to be wrong about that sometimes.
My time as a regular with the Stanford Wushu Club ended when I set off for law school five years ago. Especially since my falling out with my former coaches there, I figured that my time there had ended for good. But membership in a college club is like that - they're inherently generational, and life moves on. I did a lot of work there. I put my heart into the place without expecting to be remembered afterward, because every four years or so there's basically a complete changing of the guard. I figured that the truest test of whether I'd succeeded in doing what I'd set out to do would be if the club's spirit thrived long after I was gone.
I expected to be forgotten. And I was okay with it. The work wasn't really about me - it was about what I believed in.
But I wasn't forgotten, even after the falling out with the coaches. One of my coworkers took his young son to Stanford, and happened by a SMAP demo, including my old club. They stayed to talk, and my coworker, remembering from casual conversation that I'd done some wushu, asked if anyone there knew me. As it turns out, they did remember me. In terms so glowing that it would embarass me to repeat them here.
I'm not in the habit of having much faith in people. It's a happy thing to be wrong about that sometimes.
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Birthday Blabber: Response to a friend's existential argument
There’s no avoiding talking about God every so often. Even with an atheist. Or maybe even especially with an atheist. I currently identify as agnostic, because my mom is Christian and my dad is an Atheist, and yet much of what I learned about what the Bible has to say, I learned from my dad, who loves a good story, and told them to me in riveting narrative even before I hit the first grade. (Well, I don’t think my dad is a dedicated atheist so much as just wary of religion.)
A friend of mine shared his opinion with me – one that I didn’t agree with, but it was worth taking the time to consider. I forget his exact opinion – which maybe he’ll repeat to me at some point or another – but it was either that God either does not exist, or is not inherently good or caring, for the following approximate logic: it is impossible for reconcile the state of the world as it stands, full of suffering and pain, with a God who is supposedly both omnipotent and compassionate, for such a God would have the power to end all misery and suffering and yet refuses to do so. I did not agree, and I felt I knew why, but it wasn’t exactly easy to put down into words. Simply put, I wasn’t quite prepared to answer the question at the time, and now that I’ve had a chance to think about it, I better understand my own position: my own personal answer isn’t brief, even if it isn’t particularly deep. I’ve been unhappy for most of my life, largely because of the way I have been treated by a great many people, and because of my own awkwardness of personality. The two fed on each other in a horribly vicious feedback loop from approximately ages 6 to 22. Unhappy or not, and agnostic or not, if pressed I would say that I do believe in God – but because of what I’ve been through, I’ve never quite been able to put my faith in a belief as simple as He Loves Me As One of His Beloved Children and If I Have Faith Then My Life Will Surely Be Filled With Blessings and Joy. Recent events have reminded me of a lot of pain, past and present. I was born with what blessings I have – and I have needed them to make it through what I’ve been through. If He’d blessed me with any less, I think I would have cracked by now.
But before I get into it, I’ll unhesitatingly offer up this disclaimer: I am no religious or Biblical scholar. I am not a philosopher, a psychologist, a theologian, or a metaphysicist and I don’t pretend to be. I haven't read Nietschze or Hobbes or Thomas Aquinas. I never heard of Kant until about two years ago. I haven't read Atlas Shrugged or Dante's Inferno. I know jack about the debate regarding free will versus determinism. Most of my education and free time was spent studying the quantifiable, the discrete, the theoretically rigorous, and not for any uppity sense of scientific supremacy over matters spiritual or emotional – it was just what I was good at, relatively speaking. It would be intellectually dishonest of me to suggest that anything I have to say here is born of anything more than my own experiences and quasi-philosophical hearsay. On some level, my understanding amounts to nothing more than, “Well, if it were me, this is how and why I would allow things to be as they are.” Also, my frequent references to “goodness” aren’t meant to imply that I see the world in terms of black and white, good and evil. It’s happened many times that two basically good people/societies/civilizations have been willing to murder each other over a difference of opinion, so while I do believe in relative good and relative evil, I’m going to refer to abstract “good” and “evil” for the sake of simplicity, or this writing is going to very quickly get entirely out of hand. So to my friend: with all that in mind, you can buy my explanation or not. Really, it matters little to me whether or not you do.
Still here? Wow, I’m surprised. Anyhow, here’s where I stand: there are things as important or more important in life than living in the absence of pain. For some people, always being happy and comfortable is all that’s important: a life free of pain and full of joy is the ultimate good, the ultimate desire, and that’s what heaven is about, and that’s what they hope to get through devotion, prayer and faith. Well, happiness is a wonderful thing, but it is not in itself good or evil. Evil people can be happy, too; in fact, a happy evil person living a life of pleasure is generally extremely bad news. So it’s not just all about happiness and pleasure. There are other people who believe that there are other things that matter more than just giddy joy and the absence of pain: justice, honor, loyalty, the greater good, etc. Although I am one of those people, I do not posit that such a stance naturally puts one on higher moral ground. The ranks of such people also include deluded martyrs, suicide bombers, fundamentalist terrorists, and various other people who believe that inflicting pain, death, and perpetrating indiscriminate oppression or murder on the innocent – or even the not-so-innocent - are all justified in the names of the things they count as being more important than happiness and a life free of pain. There is a venomously dangerous pride in assuming you know better than everyone else. I’m sure the Klansmen thought they were doing the right thing when they were lynching blacks in the South. I’m sure Eric Rudolph and James Kopp thought they were doing the right thing when they murdered doctors because they believe abortion is always wrong. So despite frequent references to “goodness,” this whole thought exercise is not about asserting any sort of moral superiority over anyone else.
For me to understand the world I live in, and the life I’ve led, it’s convenient for me to assume that there are things more important to God than for us to live life completely free of pain and sadness. As long as we’re talking about God, let’s just accept for the sake of argument that there is an afterlife, there is a Heaven, and that God lets good souls into heaven. If it were me, I would care about the quality of the souls who get into Heaven – the truth and depth of their goodness, compassion, and sincerity. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, so being a good person is about more than saying the right things and reciting the right devotions. God is omniscient; he sees hearts. You can pay all the lip service you want; I wouldn’t presume to guess at what motivates God, but well, mere words wouldn’t mean much to me. If I see a person doing good things, informed by wisdom and tempered with humility, I’ll believe he or she is a good person. If I see a person walk up to me and say, “I’m a good person. I’m such a good person. Believe me, I’m pure of heart. I’m good, I’m good, I’m soooo good. Holyholyholyholy Hosannah on the highest, amenamenamen.” I probably wouldn’t buy it. I’d find it unctuous.
How would you know you’ve been a good person? Talk is cheap. I think your faith and principles are most strongly demonstrated when something that is important to you is on the line, and you're being asked to put your money where your mouth is, when it could cost you personally to do so. If you don't believe in my assumption or simply cannot accept it even as an axiom for the sake of argument, check out now. I won't try to convert you, it's not my place and it's not my desire. I think that if He cares about the quality of one's heart and soul, in terms of who is worthy of Heaven, then bad things are allowed to happen to us in life because they are opportunities for us to see for ourselves who we really are. And when you see who you really are, it’s up to you to ignore it or decide whether you want to change or improve yourself. Calling it “Testing,” I think, is too harsh a word and it implies too much interference. It's more about us rising to the occasion, to demonstrate - not just claim or state or promise - that we are good people, that we strive to exhibit compassion, courage, fortitude, faith, perseverance, self-sacrifice, altruism, humility, determination, honor, and all the other good qualities that actually take effort to maintain when the going gets tough. Anyone can act like a good person when life is easy, pleasant, and devoid of pain. But it’s when life is being bad to you that being a good person entails the hardest self-sacrifice, effort, or commitment to principles. It is easy to give to others or to do the right thing when your fortunes are abundant. It is harder to sacrifice or show compassion when your heart is full of hurt, when you feel that the world has abandoned you, or when life’s fortunes have landed tails-up for you the last eighty times in a row. It’s harder to give the last dollar out of your pocket when it’s all you have to your name, or when the thirst for vengeance shouts loudly over any motivation to be constructive.
If God never allowed anything bad to happen to us, we'd be untested, untempered. We could all blithely say we were good and innocent, but there would be no value to it. If you want to take a Creationist's view of things, the last people on Earth who could have been excused for being ignorant and innocent and held wholly unaccountable for their actions and the quality of their sincerity, were Adam and Eve - and they just frakking blew it for all of us and for all time. If the world were a sweet, nice, pretty place totally free of travail, pain, and the neglect visited on you by other people, your principles would never become informed by wisdom or tried by hardship. Your goodness would be pure, perhaps, but it would also be vapid, flaccid, and weak. The first bad thing to happen to you would be a shock, and you wouldn’t know how to face it. And if nothing bad ever happened to anyone else either, you would never be asked to take up a shield and rush to the defense of loved ones or innocents.
Is all this onerous testing necessary? I’m not sure that it is, but I would offer this: I’ve been told by many people that I’ve done a lot of good in this life, and I’m still young. I’ve taught a lot of people, stood loyally by friends and strangers in pain, and generally tried to go the distance when nobody else (or not enough other people) steps up to the task. If you think I’m being uppity or taking credit for things I shouldn’t, it’s your right to think so. I’m not saying I’m a hero or anything. If you look on me with disdain, let me tell you – you aren’t the first, you won’t be the last, and I’ve gotten pretty used to it over the years. But if my life these past fifteen years had been happier, would I have tried as hard to help other people, or sacrifice any of my time or happiness to do the right thing? I don't know that I would have. I don’t know that I'm that good a person. Maybe God means for me to be unhappy because God knows I do more good for the people around me when I'm in that emotional state. It’s mostly only through my own loneliness, my own disappointments, and my own heartbreaks that I can recognize any of what other people go through. If I have compassion, that’s where it came from. I’ve heard people arguing philosophy – arguing against Utilitarianism by positing this particularly ridiculous thought exercise: if the world could be a utopia, conditioned on the existence of one poor, miserable, wretched child locked in a closet, in loneliness, pain, and absolute suffering, would it be worth it? I’ve never liked that example because it’s a loaded question. It picks at your guilt, a lower, base emotion, in an attempt to get you to reject a philosophical proposition wholesale. Change the perspective. Would you volunteer to be that poor child, tormented, abandoned, and utterly without love, so that the rest of the world might know bliss? Would you care about everyone else, friends or strangers, that much? Or would you pass the buck and say it’s not your responsibility, because Jesus did it for you? The question is unfair either way you ask it, but one tries to tweak you by appealing to your sense of guilt, the other asks how deeply you would be willing to sacrifice of your own happiness, how strongly you would be moved by compassion.
Enter free will. Sure, God is omniscient. He knows whether we're bad or good. If He were not omniscient, I would be tempted to say that He wouldn’t be qualified to pass Judgment. He gave us free will so that we could prove ourselves, so that we could choose to change our destinies - to become bad people from good, or become good people from bad. That free will is a gift to us, but it is also His way of ensuring that people who are actually good - not just people who pay lip-service to goodness - are deemed worthy. It is shown in the choices we make, in the actions we take, of the good and the harm that we do, in the judgments we pass on each other and the sincerity or hypocrisy of the ethical, moral, and human principles each of us professes to hold dear in the face of opposition, adversity, or reason. Without both free will and the existence of challenges and injustice in our environment, those of us who unknowingly hold misguided principles would never have the opportunity to be shown wrong, to have occasion to reevaluate our principles, or to change who we are. We evolve, mature, and adapt when life challenges us, when we are hurt, when we are forced to fight for the innocent, or whether and when the sight of our fellows' suffering moves us to heal or protect. And the way we react in these situations shows the truth in our hearts more brightly, more starkly, than any set of intellectualized or moralized debates or rationalizations. It is when we are in pain or under attack that we cower or rise, fight or flee. Only when tested can we know who we are, or change who we are. If life were only good, who would feel the need to change anything at all, let alone re-examine the core of who he or she is?
In that respect, most of the evil that exists in the world is caused by the free will of other human beings, many simply by being who they are and indulging their baser or more selfish desires at the cost of others. God allows them to be who they are, because they must be allowed to choose whether they wish to be in Heaven or not, whether they care about it or not. From those who either aren't worthy yet or don't care to become worthy, the consequences of their free will spill out onto other people, incidentally providing the harsh circumstances and provoking the reactions and precipitating the painful experiences that cause others to reflect upon who they truly are inside. In other words, the free will of bad people provides adversity by circumstance. They provide the struggles that move other people to demonstrate and discover who they are in the face of hostility and adversity. God doesn't have to go to any trouble to provide more testing. And as for those people who choose evil or amorality over goodness, their continued free will is necessary to allow any of them a chance at self-redemption.
But isn’t this an unnecessarily hard way to do things? As much as I’m loath to think it, I’d have to say no. If God just used his omnipotence to make all of that unnecessary and just force people to be good from the very beginning, then none of us would ever have the chance to prove ourselves, to improve ourselves, to temper ourselves into becoming wiser, more virtuous, more understanding beings. It's good to have a good heart - but what use is a nice coward? A sweet pushover? A moral nobody? A principled lethargic? How much use are any of these? These are good people. But useless people, who may be driven before a storm like so many hapless refugees scarcely capable of saving themselves, let alone each other. These are not navigators who will brave life's maelstroms on missions of compassion or expeditions for truth. These are not laborers who will build levees to hold back the tide. These are not healers who will seek out the wounded, the weary, nor teachers who will lead by example. I believe people usually become these things after seeing wrongs in the world and choosing to change them. If there were no wrongs, there would be no need for such people, which on the one hand would be pleasant, but it would offer fewer opportunities for individual growth. (Some people seem to like the sheep and shepherd metaphors a lot. If someone totally buys the supposition that God really wants us to be happy sheep, then I doubt my line of thinking would be very convincing to him or her.) If God is like a stern but loving parent, as many have suggested to me, He may be most pleased in the knowledge that his creations have potential - have the ability to make more of themselves and improve themselves. Why not? A parent may love his or her child unconditionally, but a parent’s pride comes from the child’s growth, doesn’t it? Maybe I wouldn’t know, I’m not a parent (and the way things are going, perhaps never will be). God could have created us fully formed as beings of goodness and strength - he could have made us all angels from the start. An act of perfect, static, and unchanging creation. But could it be that the greater feat of creation is to create something small, weak, and humble that is nonetheless, in itself, capable of creation? If God helps those who help themselves, then I would think that there is more dignity, grace, and honor in a soul that chooses to do the right thing, despite temptation, hardship, fatigue, or thanklessness than in one that does good only because it knows nothing else.
So to recapitulate in brief: I think the world is imperfect and that suffering exists because God gave us free will, and that was given to us because His concern is as much with the strength and goodness we choose to grow in our hearts as with our simple happiness in life. It is through the consequences of free will – our own and that of others – that we see our own true colors and have the opportunity to change them for better or worse. God can be omnipotent and compassionate at the same time if His desires go beyond merely providing us with a happy and painless life. It is only if one assumes that God’s compassion outweighs His valuation of other virtues that an omnipotent, compassionate God seems internally contradictory.
Well, whatever. I’m sure someone has said it all before, somewhere else. I just haven’t read it.
Also: this is for a limited time only. I generally prefer to write about secular things. Nothing seems to bring out the judgmental side in people as talking about spiritual matters, and the longer I leave this up here, the more likely it is that someone is going to want to tell me I’m wrong about something or other. Can I deal with it? Sure, but I wrote this as a birthday present to myself, mostly, and if it wasn’t clear yet, I’ve been through plenty of personal attacks already in life and there are probably more on the way. If someone wants to pick a fight with me, that’s fine… but I’d rather not do it over my birthday present to myself.
There’s no avoiding talking about God every so often. Even with an atheist. Or maybe even especially with an atheist. I currently identify as agnostic, because my mom is Christian and my dad is an Atheist, and yet much of what I learned about what the Bible has to say, I learned from my dad, who loves a good story, and told them to me in riveting narrative even before I hit the first grade. (Well, I don’t think my dad is a dedicated atheist so much as just wary of religion.)
A friend of mine shared his opinion with me – one that I didn’t agree with, but it was worth taking the time to consider. I forget his exact opinion – which maybe he’ll repeat to me at some point or another – but it was either that God either does not exist, or is not inherently good or caring, for the following approximate logic: it is impossible for reconcile the state of the world as it stands, full of suffering and pain, with a God who is supposedly both omnipotent and compassionate, for such a God would have the power to end all misery and suffering and yet refuses to do so. I did not agree, and I felt I knew why, but it wasn’t exactly easy to put down into words. Simply put, I wasn’t quite prepared to answer the question at the time, and now that I’ve had a chance to think about it, I better understand my own position: my own personal answer isn’t brief, even if it isn’t particularly deep. I’ve been unhappy for most of my life, largely because of the way I have been treated by a great many people, and because of my own awkwardness of personality. The two fed on each other in a horribly vicious feedback loop from approximately ages 6 to 22. Unhappy or not, and agnostic or not, if pressed I would say that I do believe in God – but because of what I’ve been through, I’ve never quite been able to put my faith in a belief as simple as He Loves Me As One of His Beloved Children and If I Have Faith Then My Life Will Surely Be Filled With Blessings and Joy. Recent events have reminded me of a lot of pain, past and present. I was born with what blessings I have – and I have needed them to make it through what I’ve been through. If He’d blessed me with any less, I think I would have cracked by now.
But before I get into it, I’ll unhesitatingly offer up this disclaimer: I am no religious or Biblical scholar. I am not a philosopher, a psychologist, a theologian, or a metaphysicist and I don’t pretend to be. I haven't read Nietschze or Hobbes or Thomas Aquinas. I never heard of Kant until about two years ago. I haven't read Atlas Shrugged or Dante's Inferno. I know jack about the debate regarding free will versus determinism. Most of my education and free time was spent studying the quantifiable, the discrete, the theoretically rigorous, and not for any uppity sense of scientific supremacy over matters spiritual or emotional – it was just what I was good at, relatively speaking. It would be intellectually dishonest of me to suggest that anything I have to say here is born of anything more than my own experiences and quasi-philosophical hearsay. On some level, my understanding amounts to nothing more than, “Well, if it were me, this is how and why I would allow things to be as they are.” Also, my frequent references to “goodness” aren’t meant to imply that I see the world in terms of black and white, good and evil. It’s happened many times that two basically good people/societies/civilizations have been willing to murder each other over a difference of opinion, so while I do believe in relative good and relative evil, I’m going to refer to abstract “good” and “evil” for the sake of simplicity, or this writing is going to very quickly get entirely out of hand. So to my friend: with all that in mind, you can buy my explanation or not. Really, it matters little to me whether or not you do.
Still here? Wow, I’m surprised. Anyhow, here’s where I stand: there are things as important or more important in life than living in the absence of pain. For some people, always being happy and comfortable is all that’s important: a life free of pain and full of joy is the ultimate good, the ultimate desire, and that’s what heaven is about, and that’s what they hope to get through devotion, prayer and faith. Well, happiness is a wonderful thing, but it is not in itself good or evil. Evil people can be happy, too; in fact, a happy evil person living a life of pleasure is generally extremely bad news. So it’s not just all about happiness and pleasure. There are other people who believe that there are other things that matter more than just giddy joy and the absence of pain: justice, honor, loyalty, the greater good, etc. Although I am one of those people, I do not posit that such a stance naturally puts one on higher moral ground. The ranks of such people also include deluded martyrs, suicide bombers, fundamentalist terrorists, and various other people who believe that inflicting pain, death, and perpetrating indiscriminate oppression or murder on the innocent – or even the not-so-innocent - are all justified in the names of the things they count as being more important than happiness and a life free of pain. There is a venomously dangerous pride in assuming you know better than everyone else. I’m sure the Klansmen thought they were doing the right thing when they were lynching blacks in the South. I’m sure Eric Rudolph and James Kopp thought they were doing the right thing when they murdered doctors because they believe abortion is always wrong. So despite frequent references to “goodness,” this whole thought exercise is not about asserting any sort of moral superiority over anyone else.
For me to understand the world I live in, and the life I’ve led, it’s convenient for me to assume that there are things more important to God than for us to live life completely free of pain and sadness. As long as we’re talking about God, let’s just accept for the sake of argument that there is an afterlife, there is a Heaven, and that God lets good souls into heaven. If it were me, I would care about the quality of the souls who get into Heaven – the truth and depth of their goodness, compassion, and sincerity. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, so being a good person is about more than saying the right things and reciting the right devotions. God is omniscient; he sees hearts. You can pay all the lip service you want; I wouldn’t presume to guess at what motivates God, but well, mere words wouldn’t mean much to me. If I see a person doing good things, informed by wisdom and tempered with humility, I’ll believe he or she is a good person. If I see a person walk up to me and say, “I’m a good person. I’m such a good person. Believe me, I’m pure of heart. I’m good, I’m good, I’m soooo good. Holyholyholyholy Hosannah on the highest, amenamenamen.” I probably wouldn’t buy it. I’d find it unctuous.
How would you know you’ve been a good person? Talk is cheap. I think your faith and principles are most strongly demonstrated when something that is important to you is on the line, and you're being asked to put your money where your mouth is, when it could cost you personally to do so. If you don't believe in my assumption or simply cannot accept it even as an axiom for the sake of argument, check out now. I won't try to convert you, it's not my place and it's not my desire. I think that if He cares about the quality of one's heart and soul, in terms of who is worthy of Heaven, then bad things are allowed to happen to us in life because they are opportunities for us to see for ourselves who we really are. And when you see who you really are, it’s up to you to ignore it or decide whether you want to change or improve yourself. Calling it “Testing,” I think, is too harsh a word and it implies too much interference. It's more about us rising to the occasion, to demonstrate - not just claim or state or promise - that we are good people, that we strive to exhibit compassion, courage, fortitude, faith, perseverance, self-sacrifice, altruism, humility, determination, honor, and all the other good qualities that actually take effort to maintain when the going gets tough. Anyone can act like a good person when life is easy, pleasant, and devoid of pain. But it’s when life is being bad to you that being a good person entails the hardest self-sacrifice, effort, or commitment to principles. It is easy to give to others or to do the right thing when your fortunes are abundant. It is harder to sacrifice or show compassion when your heart is full of hurt, when you feel that the world has abandoned you, or when life’s fortunes have landed tails-up for you the last eighty times in a row. It’s harder to give the last dollar out of your pocket when it’s all you have to your name, or when the thirst for vengeance shouts loudly over any motivation to be constructive.
If God never allowed anything bad to happen to us, we'd be untested, untempered. We could all blithely say we were good and innocent, but there would be no value to it. If you want to take a Creationist's view of things, the last people on Earth who could have been excused for being ignorant and innocent and held wholly unaccountable for their actions and the quality of their sincerity, were Adam and Eve - and they just frakking blew it for all of us and for all time. If the world were a sweet, nice, pretty place totally free of travail, pain, and the neglect visited on you by other people, your principles would never become informed by wisdom or tried by hardship. Your goodness would be pure, perhaps, but it would also be vapid, flaccid, and weak. The first bad thing to happen to you would be a shock, and you wouldn’t know how to face it. And if nothing bad ever happened to anyone else either, you would never be asked to take up a shield and rush to the defense of loved ones or innocents.
Is all this onerous testing necessary? I’m not sure that it is, but I would offer this: I’ve been told by many people that I’ve done a lot of good in this life, and I’m still young. I’ve taught a lot of people, stood loyally by friends and strangers in pain, and generally tried to go the distance when nobody else (or not enough other people) steps up to the task. If you think I’m being uppity or taking credit for things I shouldn’t, it’s your right to think so. I’m not saying I’m a hero or anything. If you look on me with disdain, let me tell you – you aren’t the first, you won’t be the last, and I’ve gotten pretty used to it over the years. But if my life these past fifteen years had been happier, would I have tried as hard to help other people, or sacrifice any of my time or happiness to do the right thing? I don't know that I would have. I don’t know that I'm that good a person. Maybe God means for me to be unhappy because God knows I do more good for the people around me when I'm in that emotional state. It’s mostly only through my own loneliness, my own disappointments, and my own heartbreaks that I can recognize any of what other people go through. If I have compassion, that’s where it came from. I’ve heard people arguing philosophy – arguing against Utilitarianism by positing this particularly ridiculous thought exercise: if the world could be a utopia, conditioned on the existence of one poor, miserable, wretched child locked in a closet, in loneliness, pain, and absolute suffering, would it be worth it? I’ve never liked that example because it’s a loaded question. It picks at your guilt, a lower, base emotion, in an attempt to get you to reject a philosophical proposition wholesale. Change the perspective. Would you volunteer to be that poor child, tormented, abandoned, and utterly without love, so that the rest of the world might know bliss? Would you care about everyone else, friends or strangers, that much? Or would you pass the buck and say it’s not your responsibility, because Jesus did it for you? The question is unfair either way you ask it, but one tries to tweak you by appealing to your sense of guilt, the other asks how deeply you would be willing to sacrifice of your own happiness, how strongly you would be moved by compassion.
Enter free will. Sure, God is omniscient. He knows whether we're bad or good. If He were not omniscient, I would be tempted to say that He wouldn’t be qualified to pass Judgment. He gave us free will so that we could prove ourselves, so that we could choose to change our destinies - to become bad people from good, or become good people from bad. That free will is a gift to us, but it is also His way of ensuring that people who are actually good - not just people who pay lip-service to goodness - are deemed worthy. It is shown in the choices we make, in the actions we take, of the good and the harm that we do, in the judgments we pass on each other and the sincerity or hypocrisy of the ethical, moral, and human principles each of us professes to hold dear in the face of opposition, adversity, or reason. Without both free will and the existence of challenges and injustice in our environment, those of us who unknowingly hold misguided principles would never have the opportunity to be shown wrong, to have occasion to reevaluate our principles, or to change who we are. We evolve, mature, and adapt when life challenges us, when we are hurt, when we are forced to fight for the innocent, or whether and when the sight of our fellows' suffering moves us to heal or protect. And the way we react in these situations shows the truth in our hearts more brightly, more starkly, than any set of intellectualized or moralized debates or rationalizations. It is when we are in pain or under attack that we cower or rise, fight or flee. Only when tested can we know who we are, or change who we are. If life were only good, who would feel the need to change anything at all, let alone re-examine the core of who he or she is?
In that respect, most of the evil that exists in the world is caused by the free will of other human beings, many simply by being who they are and indulging their baser or more selfish desires at the cost of others. God allows them to be who they are, because they must be allowed to choose whether they wish to be in Heaven or not, whether they care about it or not. From those who either aren't worthy yet or don't care to become worthy, the consequences of their free will spill out onto other people, incidentally providing the harsh circumstances and provoking the reactions and precipitating the painful experiences that cause others to reflect upon who they truly are inside. In other words, the free will of bad people provides adversity by circumstance. They provide the struggles that move other people to demonstrate and discover who they are in the face of hostility and adversity. God doesn't have to go to any trouble to provide more testing. And as for those people who choose evil or amorality over goodness, their continued free will is necessary to allow any of them a chance at self-redemption.
But isn’t this an unnecessarily hard way to do things? As much as I’m loath to think it, I’d have to say no. If God just used his omnipotence to make all of that unnecessary and just force people to be good from the very beginning, then none of us would ever have the chance to prove ourselves, to improve ourselves, to temper ourselves into becoming wiser, more virtuous, more understanding beings. It's good to have a good heart - but what use is a nice coward? A sweet pushover? A moral nobody? A principled lethargic? How much use are any of these? These are good people. But useless people, who may be driven before a storm like so many hapless refugees scarcely capable of saving themselves, let alone each other. These are not navigators who will brave life's maelstroms on missions of compassion or expeditions for truth. These are not laborers who will build levees to hold back the tide. These are not healers who will seek out the wounded, the weary, nor teachers who will lead by example. I believe people usually become these things after seeing wrongs in the world and choosing to change them. If there were no wrongs, there would be no need for such people, which on the one hand would be pleasant, but it would offer fewer opportunities for individual growth. (Some people seem to like the sheep and shepherd metaphors a lot. If someone totally buys the supposition that God really wants us to be happy sheep, then I doubt my line of thinking would be very convincing to him or her.) If God is like a stern but loving parent, as many have suggested to me, He may be most pleased in the knowledge that his creations have potential - have the ability to make more of themselves and improve themselves. Why not? A parent may love his or her child unconditionally, but a parent’s pride comes from the child’s growth, doesn’t it? Maybe I wouldn’t know, I’m not a parent (and the way things are going, perhaps never will be). God could have created us fully formed as beings of goodness and strength - he could have made us all angels from the start. An act of perfect, static, and unchanging creation. But could it be that the greater feat of creation is to create something small, weak, and humble that is nonetheless, in itself, capable of creation? If God helps those who help themselves, then I would think that there is more dignity, grace, and honor in a soul that chooses to do the right thing, despite temptation, hardship, fatigue, or thanklessness than in one that does good only because it knows nothing else.
So to recapitulate in brief: I think the world is imperfect and that suffering exists because God gave us free will, and that was given to us because His concern is as much with the strength and goodness we choose to grow in our hearts as with our simple happiness in life. It is through the consequences of free will – our own and that of others – that we see our own true colors and have the opportunity to change them for better or worse. God can be omnipotent and compassionate at the same time if His desires go beyond merely providing us with a happy and painless life. It is only if one assumes that God’s compassion outweighs His valuation of other virtues that an omnipotent, compassionate God seems internally contradictory.
Well, whatever. I’m sure someone has said it all before, somewhere else. I just haven’t read it.
Also: this is for a limited time only. I generally prefer to write about secular things. Nothing seems to bring out the judgmental side in people as talking about spiritual matters, and the longer I leave this up here, the more likely it is that someone is going to want to tell me I’m wrong about something or other. Can I deal with it? Sure, but I wrote this as a birthday present to myself, mostly, and if it wasn’t clear yet, I’ve been through plenty of personal attacks already in life and there are probably more on the way. If someone wants to pick a fight with me, that’s fine… but I’d rather not do it over my birthday present to myself.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Consumer Goodwill
Wow. The teahouse near work has added salads to its menu, and I ordered a personal favorite: Insalata Caprese (fresh buffalo mozzarella with basil and roma tomatoes). At about $7 for an entree salad, it's a fair price especially considering that this is in Palo Alto. And they gave me the whole cheese - imported from Italy, basil as strong as I've ever had it, and about 3 Roma tomatoes, flavorful and fresh. Again, wow. Very generous - and practically at cost! I couldn't prepare it at home myself for less (especially after gas).
Mmmmmmmmm good.
Wow. The teahouse near work has added salads to its menu, and I ordered a personal favorite: Insalata Caprese (fresh buffalo mozzarella with basil and roma tomatoes). At about $7 for an entree salad, it's a fair price especially considering that this is in Palo Alto. And they gave me the whole cheese - imported from Italy, basil as strong as I've ever had it, and about 3 Roma tomatoes, flavorful and fresh. Again, wow. Very generous - and practically at cost! I couldn't prepare it at home myself for less (especially after gas).
Mmmmmmmmm good.
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